Meet Ann

Nice to meet you! My name’s plain & simple Ann, without even the fanciful 'e.' Glad you found your way here into some quiet. I know — it can get a bit loud out there. Maybe you’d like to wander a bit in the quiet — — Let's connect...
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My dad loved another woman and another woman belittled my mama while she slept in her bedroom and scrubbed mama’s memories out of her own house and I’ve done my own spiteful share of burning. I’m the fig branch that should have been hacked off.

I have bowed and said it aloud for decades.“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Who lives this?

If we only got into the Christ-faith through the door of forgiveness, how can we claim Christ as our home if we aren’t people who forgive?

Words and ideology on a page are cheap. Grace and incarnating the love of Christ isn’t.

I do want there to be another way —another way, where they pay their debt of pain. I forget that I haven’t had to pay, me bought with the blood of God.

My little brother and I used to imagine finding that man. Does “love your enemies” have any loop holes? How far can forgiveness go?

I have known this though: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves us all starving and groping in the dark.

In the evenings, in the dark setting in, I sit and knit a bit.

There are lilacs on the table, a bouquet spraying over the vase, over the edge. A twisted old limb that somehow bore grace, somehow blossomed.

And I move them, these two wooden needles, these two pieces of wood pointed, sharpened at the ends.

I knit and pray my own wandering version through of an old prayer for old pain:

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.
Enemies have loosed me from earth more than friends have…
Enemies have made me a hunted animal, finding safer shelter than an unhunted animal does.

I found safest sanctuary in You…may too my enemies-made-grace.I found greatest grace in You… may my enemies-made-grace find Your generous grace alive and radical in me.
I found fullest forgiveness in You… may my enemies-made-grace find faith and freedom in You and Your forgiveness working surprising ways in me.

The longer I walk with you, Lord, I find I have no enemies: only your gift of chisels etching me deep.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

In the shadows, there is this — the murmured prayers and the needles with pointed edges touching each other, theses needles looking like arrows.

Looking like they’re looking for loop holes out of love…

But then the needles do the unexpected —

this slipping of delicate prayers around each other slow and an act of the will, this knitting and uniting.

This week and the following 2 weeks, might we consider: The Practice of Resurrection. We look forward to your thoughts, stories, ideas….

Today, if you’d like to share with community The Practice of Sacrifice … just quietly slip in the direct URL to your exact post….. If you join us, we humbly ask that you please help us find each other by sharing the community’s graphic within your post.

Join me in #365GIFT — and become a brokenhearted hallelujah, a GIFT to the world, every day for a year, living broken and given, one intentional act of brokenhearted compassion at a time. Subscribe to posts and let’s begin together.